Building a survey: Full vs Lightning

What the survey composer is

Forms is where Verinode reads the opinions your business already generates and turns them into structured signal: how your team rates a vendor, whether a carrier is worth keeping, how a process actually feels to the people running it day to day. The survey composer is the modal you open to build one of those polls. It comes in two modes that trade off depth for speed, Full survey and Lightning, and the same modal handles audience selection, delivery channel, and scheduling for both.

Verinode does not decide who to survey or what a good score looks like. You pick the subject, the questions, and the recipients; Verinode sends it, collects the replies, and (with consent) folds an anonymized composite into the peer benchmark layer so your rating contributes to, and benefits from, what the wider network is seeing.

Where to find it

Open Forms from the sidebar at /forms. The page header shows three tab pills, Surveys, Audits, Reviews, and a copper button on the right whose label tracks whichever tab is active: + Add Survey on the Surveys tab (the one this article covers), + Add Audit or + Add Review on the other two. Clicking + Add Survey opens the composer modal, titled New Survey.

The same modal opens pre-filled in two other places: from an action plan that ships a ready-made survey artifact (title and questions arrive already set, mode defaults to Full survey), and from a quick one-tap send elsewhere in the product (for example, a team-member panel's satisfaction pulse), which defaults straight to Lightning with the subject already chosen.

Full survey vs Lightning: the mode toggle

At the top of the modal sits a two-way toggle: Lightning (1 question) on the left, Full survey on the right. Whichever side you click becomes active (highlighted dark) and swaps the form below it. The modal defaults to Lightning unless it was opened with a pre-filled full-survey artifact, in which case it opens on Full survey instead.

Lightning is a single rating question, delivered by email and/or text, answered with a plain number, no link, no form to open. It exists for the check-ins you want answered inside thirty seconds: "How satisfied are you with this vendor?" sent to three people who reply "4" from their phone.

Full survey is a real multi-question instrument built from a template: a title, a subject, an editable list of rating, yes/no, and open-text questions, and a real invite link the recipient opens to answer. It exists for the assessments you actually want to read afterward and revisit on a schedule, not just glance at.

Full survey: template, subject, title

Choosing a template

The Full survey form opens with a Template grid, two columns of cards. Each card shows the template's name in bold and a one-line description underneath. Nine templates ship today:

| Template | What it asks about | Needs a subject? | |---|---|---| | Vendor Assessment | Delivery, quality, and value from a specific vendor | Yes, pick the vendor | | Tool Feedback | How the team feels about a software tool day to day | Yes, pick the tool | | Process Review | How well an internal process is working | Yes, name the process | | Supply Feedback | Quality and consistency of supplies from a vendor | Yes, pick the supplier | | Carrier Assessment | Payment speed, approvals, and communication from a carrier | Yes, pick the carrier | | TPA Program Review | Lead quality, fairness of scoring, SLA terms, and net profitability of a TPA program | Yes, pick the program | | Team Tool Stack, first-day rating | Sent automatically when a teammate accepts their invite; rates every tool on their assigned stack | No | | Team Satisfaction (1-click) | A lightweight check-in on a single teammate's workload, fit, and flight risk | Yes, pick the team member | | Team Satisfaction (sent to the team) | Sent directly to teammates to rate their own satisfaction, workload, and likelihood to stay | No |

Clicking a card selects it (it outlines in copper), resets the question list to that template's default questions, and clears the title and subject fields so you don't carry over stale values from whatever you were looking at before.

Subject

If the template needs a subject, a labeled field appears below the grid, labeled with the subject type itself (Vendor, Tool, Process, Supplier, Carrier, or TPA Program). For vendor, tool, and supply templates this is a dropdown pulled from your existing vendor relationships, listing each by name. For process, carrier, and TPA templates it's a free-text field (placeholder: "e.g. Job intake process"), since those subjects aren't always tied to a vendor record. Picking a subject auto-fills the survey title as {Template label} - {Subject name} (for example, "Vendor Assessment - Acme Supplies") so you rarely have to type a title by hand.

Title

The Survey Title field is a plain text input, placeholder "e.g. Vendor Assessment - Acme Supplies". It's required: leaving it blank and clicking Send or Save as draft returns "Survey title is required."

Editing the question list

Below the title sits Questions, labeled with either "(from template)" or "(customized)" depending on whether you've touched anything since picking the template. Each question is its own row, numbered, with:

• A text input for the question label itself.
• A type dropdown: Rating 1–5, Yes / No / Maybe, or Open text.
• A Required checkbox.
• A Remove link that deletes the question outright.

A dashed + Add question button at the bottom appends a new blank question (defaulting to open text, not required). If you've edited anything, a Reset to template link appears next to the "(customized)" label, which discards your edits and restores the template's original question set exactly as shipped.

This is the same editable list an action-plan survey artifact lands in when it opens the modal pre-filled: the plan's questions populate the list already marked "(customized)," and you can trim, reword, or add to them before sending exactly as you would with a template.

Scheduling: run it once or on a cadence

Beneath the questions, a Run on a schedule checkbox opens a recurrence picker. Left unchecked, the survey is one-shot: it sends (or saves as a draft) once, full stop. Checking it exposes six cadence buttons: Weekly, Every 2 weeks, Monthly, Quarterly, Every 6 months, Annually. The helper text under the checkbox reads: "We'll re-send to the same group on the cadence you pick. Pause anytime from the survey detail panel."

Turning recurrence on snapshots the invitee list you've selected at creation time. Every future fire on that cadence goes to that same frozen roster, by email only, not to whoever happens to be on your team roster at fire time. This is deliberate: a quarterly tool-feedback pulse should track the same set of people's opinions over time, not silently drift as your team changes. If you need to change who's included in a recurring series later, do it from the survey detail panel rather than by editing this list after the fact.

Once a recurring survey exists, its next scheduled fire shows up wherever Forms surfaces an upcoming-sends calendar. From the detail panel you can pause a series (it keeps its history, invite roster, and responses, it just stops firing) and resume it later; resuming computes a fresh next-send date from the pause point rather than replaying whatever fires were missed while paused.

Full survey: recipients, send, and draft

Invite Team Members

Below the question editor (or below Delivery, in Lightning mode) sits Invite Team Members: a scrollable list of your team roster, each row a checkbox, the member's name, and a line of role plus contact info (email and/or phone, separated by middot). A Select all / Deselect all link appears in the header once at least one member is eligible to receive this survey.

In Full survey mode, only members with an email address on file are selectable; team members without an email show their checkbox disabled and grayed out. There's no in-modal way to add an email for a full survey, only quick-add for phone numbers in Lightning mode (see below), so if someone you need to reach has no email, add it from the Team section first.

Include me. If you're signed in, a dashed-border row appears above the member list reading "Include me ({your email})." Checking it adds your own inbox to the recipient list, alongside your team, with the note: "You'll get the same email as everyone else, answer alongside the team to test the wording or set the owner baseline." This is useful for seeing exactly what your team sees before trusting the results, or for contributing your own answer as the owner's baseline against the team's.

Send now or save as draft

The footer has two buttons in Full survey mode: Save as draft and Send to {n}, where {n} is the number of currently checked recipients (an em dash shows when nobody is checked yet). Save as draft writes the survey without sending any invites, status draft, so you can come back and finish it later. Send fires the invite emails immediately and sets status to active.

Sending requires at least one selected recipient with an email on file; if you click Send with nobody checked, you get "Select at least one team member with an email address." After a successful send, you'll see a confirmation reading "Survey sent to N recipient(s)" (singular/plural matches the count); saving as a draft with a recurrence cadence attached instead confirms "Survey scheduled," and a plain draft with no cadence confirms "Survey saved as draft."

Lightning: subject, question, delivery

Lightning's form is shorter, four fields instead of a template grid:

What are you rating? A dropdown of subject types: Vendor, Tool, Carrier, TPA Program, Process. Picking a type determines whether the Subject field below becomes a vendor dropdown (vendor and tool) or a free-text field (carrier, TPA, process).

Subject. Same behavior as the Full survey subject field: selecting a vendor auto-fills the question below as "How satisfied are you with {vendor name}?"

Question. A single free-text field, prefilled with the satisfaction phrasing above but fully editable, placeholder "How satisfied are you with…?" Underneath it: "Team members reply with a number 1-5. No link, no form."

Delivery. A three-way toggle: EMAIL, SMS, Email + SMS. Whichever is active determines who's eligible to receive the send: email mode only shows checkboxes enabled for members with an email on file, SMS mode only for members with a phone on file, and Email + SMS enables anyone with either.

Phone numbers and quick-add (SMS mode only)

Switching delivery to SMS or Email + SMS changes two things in the member list. First, any member missing a phone number shows an inline "No phone" tag next to their row, plus a small phone-number input and Save button right below it, so you can add a number on the spot without leaving the modal. Second, a Quick add team member panel appears under the member list: name and phone fields plus an Add button, for adding someone to your roster who isn't there yet. A quick-added member without an email shows a reminder below the list: "Remember to add an email for {name} in the Team section so they can sign in." Quick-added members are auto-checked as recipients.

Sending

Lightning has one footer button: Send now to {n}, no draft option, Lightning always sends immediately on submit. Clicking it with nobody selected returns "Select at least one team member." A confirmation follows the send: "Survey sent to N recipient(s)."

What happens after you send

Every response, Full or Lightning, updates the subject's team-satisfaction figure immediately (not on a nightly batch), and, where the recipient has consented and the survey isn't a demo record, feeds an anonymized composite into the peer benchmark layer, one composite per operator per subject per metric, not one row per respondent, so a single operator with a large team can't tilt a peer average just by asking more people the same question. When any reply lands at 2 out of 5 or below on the primary rating question, Verinode raises a heads-up notification separately from the ordinary "response received" note, so a bad signal doesn't get lost in routine traffic.

Empty states

If your team roster is empty, the Invite Team Members section reads: "No team members yet. Use quick add below." (Quick add only shows in Lightning SMS mode; in Full survey or Lightning email mode with no team members, add people from the Team section first.)

Best-practice example

You've just signed a new vendor and want early read on how the crew feels. Open Forms, click + Add Survey, leave the toggle on Lightning (it's the default), set "What are you rating?" to Vendor, pick the vendor from the dropdown (the question auto-fills to "How satisfied are you with {vendor}?"), leave delivery on Email, check the three crew members who've worked with them, and check Include me so you get a baseline reading too. Send now. Three weeks later, once you've got more signal and want the full picture, quality plus reliability plus value plus an open-text "what's not working," switch to Full survey, pick Vendor Assessment, select the same vendor, and turn on Run on a schedule set to quarterly so you keep reading the same group's opinion over time instead of a one-off snapshot.

Related help

• The decision workspace
• Acting on decisions
• Benchmarks overview
• How benchmarks work
• Clients and carriers